Riots

‘Tears, terror at the concert that made history’ was one of the newspaper headlines the day after the Queen St riot of December 1984.

The third and deciding rugby test at Eden Park, Auckland, is best remembered for the flares and flour bombs dropped onto the playing field. Outside the ground, violence erupted on an unprecedented scale.

Up to 2000 anti-Springbok tour protesters were confronted by police who used batons to stop them marching up Molesworth St to the home of South Africa's Consul to New Zealand

The disturbance followed a botched escape attempt and lasted into the next day. Prisoners took several warders hostage and fire gutted part of the prison.

Just outside the Wairarapa town of Featherston, a memorial garden marks the site of a Second World War incident that resulted in the deaths of 48 Japanese prisoners of war and one guard.

Auckland’s Queen Street riot was by far the most destructive of the disturbances that rocked the four main centres in the ‘angry autumn’ of 1932.

During the 'angry autumn' of 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, unemployed workers in Dunedin reacted angrily when the Hospital Board refused to assist them.

Four months after the end of the First World War, hundreds of New Zealand soldiers rioted at Sling Camp on Salisbury Plain in southern England. It was the most serious breakdown of discipline in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the European theatre.

In Christchurch, 30 Catholic Irishmen attacked an Orange (Protestant) procession with pick-handles, while in Timaru, 150 men from Thomas O’Driscoll’s Hibernian Hotel surrounded Orangemen and prevented their procession taking place.